 Thank you. Hello. Good morning. I am Georgina Lewis with Shazam Media. Thank you for having me today I'm gonna talk to you about reoccurring revenue I have the slides up here at our website if you want to pull them down There's some other little giddy, so we're gonna be talking about at that site that you can pull down during this session I'm gonna be talking pretty quickly. So Let me tell you a little bit about myself first I Graduated college in three years with two degrees from Westland College all women's college and Computers and business I went to work for IBM bar business Which then within a year from that I bought that business out 14 years later We I sold that multi-million dollar business and the majority of the revenue was reoccurring revenue now in the IBM world Reoccurring revenue was licenses that we sold and then we could lock down the computer And they had to pay us for an annual renewal of that license. It's a little different from WordPress type environment in 2008 our oldest daughter Was number three pro golfer in the world so she turned professional and I thought I'd retire sold my business And wanted to be a caddy So that worked for like 12 months until I realized I don't like her being my boss and Complaining that I need to walk faster and I need to get to the ball before her and I need to have the yardage done So I retired we had a real caddy for the pros work and I became her agent, which I liked a lot better during this time a lot of People that I knew in golf golf magazine sports illustrated A lot of the top 100 golf instructors in the world were just 20,000 of them They all vote in the top 133 of those are now our clients today and they came to us to help us build their brand so today What I do with Shazam media is I'm a social media Ecosystem strategist and basically I help companies fortify their brands on the internet which I love to do and I'm empowered to do that because of our reoccurring revenue that comes into the company So I make money while I sleep and I get to choose what I like to do out of the plethora of offerings that we have So in 2009 2010, I am my husband who never worked with me before in the IBM business partnered with me and we started a website design business we started small we picked WordPress and We started using premium themes and we hired contractors to do custom work for us Even though I know six programming languages. I didn't want to really go out there and learn Java and build themes so What we're going to talk about today is ways that our company makes money and it's a little different than What a lot of people do in the WordPress world and what I'd like to challenge you to do is think about How can you take that model and maybe think outside the box and add some base revenue to your? current revenue stream So that's why you should focus on reoccurring revenue okay Why reoccurring revenue can help you is because it's profitable and it's sustainable So if you give a good product to your clients, you will hold on to that client for a very long time we have Something like a 95% Retention rate and a lot of people that we do lose is because they either went out of business or they you know, we help them find a better WordPress provider somewhere else and that's what I learned from coming to WordCamp was how to help your problem clients find a better Consultant so There's a lot of ways to learn Do reoccurring revenue? I'm gonna touch on the three main sectors and You're just going to have to figure out what sector is the best for you Now I am not talking about reoccurring revenue is not You selling a package of your services that you have to perform somewhere in the future and get in the revenue today reoccurring revenue is you selling something that you don't have to do anything for Every month for the next four years unless you choose Okay Before you pick one of these options you need to research and you need to plan you need to figure out what your competitors are doing so No matter what we do Chazan media whether it's helping a customer brand themselves or we pick on a new topic Ourself or an offering Re-research we want to know how profitable and how much Energy we have to put into doing that and how you know, we're gonna win So how are we gonna do that and do that? Well? First thing I'm talking about is subscription and membership based revenue Okay Here's some examples Magazine websites newsletter websites forum websites Freed and paid content websites. We often build these for our clients Well, if a client comes to me and they say, you know, I really wanted these are all premium offerings that we issues Am offer to our clients So we have base price for that's fixed and it's been the same price for three years for our website solutions Because we're in a growth model. So I should tell you that We are not an agency that wants 50 clients that we charge 25 to 50,000 a year for We are an agency that wants which we have a hundred and fifty clients That we have on hosting that pays about a thousand dollars or more of month a year So that's a hundred fifty thousand dollars. We know is coming in and that's our base that we can then Take December off if we want, you know But that's our sustainable income and we would rather sell good quality volume sites as our base That empowers us to do all the other Alucard services So we a lot of we've divided up our solutions into base products And then if we do a LinkedIn offering or we do Facebook solutions, those are all a cart Okay So magazine and newsletter sites, right? Typically those are sites that are put up and people pay for ad space to be on those sites most the content is free Foreign-based websites are where people come together answer questions for the general public And if it's a good topic and it's been SEO'd properly You should get a lot of hits off your forum website But you've got to have two or three administrators moderators to answer those questions and Part of that content can be free and part of that can be paid So we have an example of that and my golf pros. We found that several of those top 100 teachers They want to come together in their very Philo-thropic golf is a very Philo-thropic industry probably the number one philanthropic industry in the nation and so they're donating their time to answer Questions and the cost of the website is covered by the paid content membership portion of those forums, but there's something like 7,000 topics in that forum that's being supported by ten different golf pros at any one time Free and paid content sites You know, that's a that's a great way to get revenue and It's a great way if you don't get revenue through Paid content you can at least capture the name put them in a newsletter Use something like MailChimp or constant contact and upsell them every month on You know information that's coming out and things that are being offered and that type of thing. We have a client That had us build a website Called junior golf ranking dot org and they are the worldwide junior ranking site and everything is free except Your child's lowest level Results and how you got a thousand points, but Joe Smith got 1500 you have to pay to get to that lowest level So you get to see your child's oh ranked number eight and believe me if you don't know this term of helicopter parents And you could figure out how to tap into helicopter parents. There's a lot of revenue in that kind of a website So we have these obsessed parents go on they want to know why they're not ranked tire They try to figure out the math behind that when they get to the lowest level they have to pay or join to get to that level Okay, so those are some examples I have resources for you. So if you choose to go down a subscription Magazine paid content type of a website for yourself or for one of your customers There are three different resources you could go look at Makota does a really good article about profitable subscription-based websites In their article, I think they give you something like seven different examples of types of subscription-based websites One of my favorite things which I subscribe to every Monday morning is my quiet time in my pajamas Sitting at my computer and I read an ink ink.com has an online subscription That helps me think about branding Growing my business What's going on in? social media and marketing All of those great topics and there was a gentleman who went and spoke at the grow conference If y'all heard of the grow conference and he talked about how subscription-based Companies are the way of the future He happens to you can go to this link that I have in the slideshow when you download it And it will take you to the ink magazine article and from there. He just published a book called the automatic customer So it's talking about customers that sign up for a subscription There's all these statistics about people who don't want to cancel their subscriptions They're afraid if they sign up today, it won't be as cheap as when they got it There's a huge retention of that income and he talks about those types of businesses. I mean, it's so basic it's like the We've all gotten those brochures in the mail where they want you to sign up for fruit every month being shipped out to you Because now you you're like I even think that's cool And I have orange trees and grapefruit trees in my yard, but I'm a go that's cool I want to sign up for that because I feel like I'm getting something every month I bought it for myself with You know, I think my husband's listening in Australia right now because he forgets to buy cool things for me so it's buying for myself, but um Marketing experiments this link is really really interesting if you go to that link They actually did some statistics about monthly subscription price points Quarterly semi annually and annually and what your retention is of certain client clients at certain price points So I really found that intriguing, but I do all this research So we do research on everything and I'm about to tell you about our hosting next Now Okay, love subscription based websites our first year I wasn't someone talking. I was like, oh, that's going to be so cool. I want to do that And we did that we have two websites out there that drive subscription based websites Revenue for us We spend a lot of time Getting a hold of other people to make sure they're answering questions or providing fresh content for that And at the end of the second year, I realized that we're just breaking even when we talk about the time that we're spending versus subscription at 1995 a month and then it goes through PayPal for us That vendor didn't have or that customer didn't have an updated Credit card. So then it expired on us and we're always chasing, you know, that revenue to get them to re-sign So there had to be a better way to do this. So in 2010 We said, you know what let's start building really good solutions Out there and let's focus on hosting And let's provide hosting to our customers. I think one of the You know Sad things about this industry with freelancers is everyone's going after the big sale for today and the work and the revenue they need today And they'll just stick their client on a shared server somewhere And that's fine, but that Solution that they provided is now hackable Right and not having a premium server is hurting their SEO So we realized that if we provided a really good hosting to our client We put them on a premium server We figured out the load that we could have on that server for our x number of clients without having to band with their speed issue right We control the Uh ip address so we get more google points. That's a georgina phrase, right? We always want to a plus on the test when I talk to customers I talk about how many points we get we're doing good things and we want to get to You know, 90 to 100 points So we get an a plus on our test and google put us on the first page So we have to do that by taking all these little things into consideration well, what I found out was Hosting is very competitive and people always ask me. Well, I can put it on google for 9.99 a year Well, yeah, you can but how we differentiated ourselves as we package services And maintenance with our hosting Now at my website with the link I gave you you can actually download Only because you're in this classroom today. I'm going to let you see our pricing for last year and the offerings that we do It's locked down. You pull it down. The password is shazam And you can go in and you can see we have three levels of hosting that we offer We have level one level two and level three And a level one It's 89 dollars a month because we found out when we did Some industry studies that our competitors were offering 89 dollars a month for level one support We figured out what their bandwidth was that they were offering How many hits per month they were offering Wp engine helps you out with that a lot because they charge you for different levels Based on performance and hits so that'll give you some baselines But then we have to differentiate ourselves. You know, what is our value add? right So in in order to get really good ongoing service To our customer and revenue and retention. We have to have value add for our hosting So the hosting with a premiere server. That's one number two We offer a basic package of support With every level so in our level one for example, we give you mr. Customer a half an hour a month Do you know we have over 140 websites around the world? And only 10 call us every month So it's a it's a great upsell It's a great value add that our clients are not utilizing because they're too busy And we built them such a good website at a low price point that it's just it just runs on cruise control They don't need to update that website that often Not only that but we gave them the keys to their car We let them in we talk them how to do pages. We do not change charge to change a page Customers love to have that empowerment now. We don't let them in the engine You know, we don't let them go in and install new plugins or change the menu things that are not recoverable If they can be recovered because you go to the bottom of page or a post you say recover this page You can have access to it But I've had a very big website That gets 50 000 hits a month Call me up because they had an intern go in and change a menu option You guess what when you delete a menu by accident you can't recover it And they're updating that website so much. I couldn't restore it from the day before So we had to go to web archive And chris, I know you're listening. I know this was you had to go do this But you need to go back to web archive figure out what the menus were and he had to recreate the man manually one at a time That next day our entire clients got blocked from menus So are we going to charge our client to change a menu? Absolutely not, but they get 30 minutes free of maintenance So they send us a little ticket At that time we were with host gator. So we got a product called wh mcs to manage our clients great tool It interfaces with subscriptions through paypal so I can send them an invoice through that It collects the subscription it puts all my subscriptions on the first of the month So I get all my money on the first of the month of every month for my clients And we're able to track our request our clients can even go into the middle of the night And enter a request for their 30 minutes on their own Again reduce in our management time and they wake up the next day. It's done Okay, so figure out a way that you can add a value add the other thing that we did is we went to a lot of work camps and Syed with optin monster a couple years ago in orlando Anyone who's at the conference he offered unlimited licenses for optin monster. Well, we spent the money and we bought that So now if our clients signed up with us at a level two or a level three Which is 189 last year or I don't know 225 if you'd have to look at my sheet They got that software Included on our servers and that licensed for free But they didn't cost us anything more. We'd already pre purchased That package and it was a great offering So when you hear about those kinds of things invest in them And make that a differentiator of yourself against your competitor Okay This is like the key I think is figuring out what can you do To offer to your clients and it's going to come in like clockwork And you don't have to do anything for that additional revenue Now we do we do a lot. I will tell you this in december of every year our kids are out of school We have four of them. Well, if you count my two 91 year old grandparents, that's Six and then you add my husband. We have seven kids Um And it's really hectic in our house at christmas. So I don't want to build websites in december We do not build websites. What we do is we send out a newsletter to all our clients and we tell them This month we're going to come through and clean up all your spam We're going to lock down all your passwords. We're going to and they love it They love that some mechanic showed up and maintenance their car and they didn't have to call us you know Okay My third reoccurring revenue idea for this presentation is ad placement Now everyone's heard of ad placement, but i'm going to give you a spin on it a little differently Okay, think outside the box We all have clients come to us and say, you know, I really want to do this, but I can't afford this and blah blah blah I need a discount well You probably don't want to call chris lewis and ask for that discount because he's hard lying. No He has to build it time is money But what we figured out is that we go ahead get a simple little agreement with our client And we say we will give you A discount But we reserve the right to put an ad on your website that we can sell to one of our other clients I don't need to sell my own marketing I We build six to ten websites a month and yesterday on my drive here. This doesn't happen every day But yesterday on my drive here I got three calls from three new prospects of my other clients and I turned one away because he didn't understand enough about his business He was not ready for us I can't brand him. I can't build a website if he doesn't know what he wants to target Now he can go find a five hundred ninety nine dollar website from somewhere else and get started and call me back in three years but You know, I've learned that mistake and so If I do have several clients that come to us and build a second and a third website because we've done so well and grown their Business 33 with the first website And then they want to discount and I say sure I want the bottom of your website that I can sell and it won't be to one of your competitors at any point in time And I know certain clients of mine are going to be successful with those ideas And I know those sites are going to get twenty five to a hundred thousand hits and when they do That's when I sell that that's based to another one of my customers They pay me because I own the spot And I make a money while I sleep So that's a spin on advertisement That you may or may not have heard before but we figured that was a great way for us to Have future sales So why focus on reoccurring revenue? Because you make money while you sleep It's not money not package services. You have to perform in the future It's not plugins that you have to support in the future and try to keep selling over and over and over again It's not themes that you have to market and compete against someone else Recurring revenue is sustainable Sustainable income is dependable That's it Any questions any questions? Yeah Yeah, the question is how do we choose the service provider? For our hosting and We made mistakes. Let's start with that. Okay And at the time we didn't think it was a mistake but We learned and so first we went with host gator and blue host and did shared shared Server space and it was not smart. We didn't have the knowledge how to go to that next level Until a couple websites got hacked and then we're like, oh my gosh, that's not very smart We stayed with those same companies and moved to you know, their premium servers as a reseller server And the problem was about three or four years ago in our experience Eig bought blue host and then they bought host gator And so when they bought blue hosts and we had a lot of downtime We moved all our clients to host gator nine months later that eig bought host gator And they put all our clients back without our knowledge at the first set of servers So we started attending word camps and we started talking and we also got a lot of meetups with other word press users And what we have discovered personally is that Of course, I know you're listening now we're going to get this wrong Wp engine is where our level two and level three clients are that's a more premium price And then Site to ground at a mind block there for a second site ground is where we put all our level one clients And we know we have now after a year we're in year five We have zero downtime We have great support from them They answer us real time. So those are the two server companies. I would recommend that you do As a reseller You're welcome. Anything else? Okay. Thank you guys